As companies battle to survive and/or grow in the toughest marketplace for decades, efforts to improve monetization are coming thick and fast. For publishers and advertisers this means that keeping track of what’s new and hot is becoming more difficult. Here are just a few of the new developments this week:

Amazon has decided that it will no longer pay referral fees to Associates in the USA and Canada who send them traffic resulting from keyword bidding and other paid search. From May 1st, data feeds used these purposes will no longer be made available either.

YouTube appears to be rolling out AdSense for Video on the professionally-produced content of almost 600 of its Content-ID partners. These ads are context-sensitive, of course, and are in addition to YouTube’s other monetization efforts like click-to-buy and paid search.

DoubleClick has agreed to offer Adgregate Market’s transactional ad technology across its display advertising network. ShopAds incorporates e-commerce transaction capabilities directly into a display ads. This allows transactions to be completed without the visitor leaving the publisher’s site. It is widget-based and enables advertisers to pay their accepted publishers an affiliate fee in addition to paying Doubleclick. This is A Good Thing for publishers.